The Price of Indoor Air Pollution: Evidence from Risk Maps and the Housing Market
利用英格兰风险地图更新的自然实验，研究发现公布的室内氡污染风险变化与房价显著负相关，且风险降低时无对称效应，高社会经济群体迁出而低群体迁入。
This study uses the housing market to examine the costs of indoor air pollution. We focus on radon, a common indoor air pollutant which is the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. For identification, we exploit a natural experiment whereby a risk map update in England induces exogenous variation in published pollution risk levels. We find a significant negative relationship between changes in published pollution risk levels and residential property prices. Interestingly, we do not find a symmetric effect for decreasing risk. We also show that the update of the risk map led higher socioeconomic groups (SEGs) to move away from affected areas, attracting lower SEG residents via lower prices. Overall, our results demonstrate that indoor air quality has material economic effects on the housing market and provide novel policy-relevant insights into how the market responds to information on environmental risks.